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Tings are collapsing in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that appears, now more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Organizations are crumbling, or reassembling themselves along new and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; at the same time, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is flowing away from authorities, and gathering in the offices of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says merchant a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are weakening and failing."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that propels The Rose Field, which continues where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, by all accounts, the author's last foray into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the launch of Northern Lights. It's a realm whose geography corresponds to that of our world, but whose history diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals appear and think and behave like us, but are joined by external spirits, souls in creature form; where the heavens are teeming with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are caught and beverages is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still clearly the sharp and determined main character of the earlier books, but aged, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This circumscription is amplified by her split from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

Pan's decision to leave in search of that innocent part of her which she may have forgotten (an trait which he epitomises as her "vision"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the driving forces of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with wonder and danger on the way. But from the beginning, profound shifts were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, bureaucratic malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the position of leader of the authority's High Council, and is set on using his newfound influence to expand the institution's control. Another protagonist, who saved baby the heroine to security along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the prequel, is now an university scholar with a sideline in spycraft: he is sent to the city to find out more about his plans. And behind all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and costly botanical extract which seems somehow to be the cause of a societal and economic disturbance spreading out from that area. The extract is seen by some as a marketable good, by different parties as a empirical or spiritual miracle, and by others still – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an challenge that must be eradicated. The issue of its source, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like the original trilogy, the heroine's deeds, and her future, are revealed to be deeply linked with the destiny of the universe

In the previous volume, these storylines ran broadly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they merge. Like the original series, Lyra's actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the future of the realm. Her private mission to rejoin with her companion and recover her vision becomes the central struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian government which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to quell independence of thinking, originality and art: all the inner, defiant ways in which humans can be free.

Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles

The novel begins with the unveiling of a series of unusual openings in the fabric of the world's sky: portals that seem to open into alternate realities. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated mystical extract. The Magisterium, with Delamare at its head, classifies these windows as a challenge to the church's beliefs and endeavors to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible reason and back to feeling, however, her certainty that these sites must be protected – that what they stand for and what they provide is in some way essential – grows. "Dust, or the substance, or the vision, or the Rose Field, or whatever we label it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a philosophical conflict between purity and experience is set.

Plot Rhythm and Protagonist Growth

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the